Rolling with Rock
DRAPER, R. S.
ON MUSIC By R. S. Draper Rolling with Rock Early in 1964, when the Beatles first received wide attention in the United States, the editorialists of the Reporter wrote a semi-humorous piece...
...Rock Around the Clock," and the other early R&R songs differed from Rhythm and Blues chiefly because they were written and performed for a white teenage audience...
...Actually, the term Folk Rock is virtually meaningless-the only element uniting the groups in the movement are the songs of Bob Dylan, sung by such groups as the Animals, Byrds, and Sonny and Cher in wildly different ways...
...In his earliest stage he was a disciple of Woody Guthrie, obtaining from that voice of the Depression a penchant for social and political protest songs, backed by his own primitive guitar and harmonica accompaniment...
...Its future metamorphoses will depend not upon the ad-men, but upon the Rock creators themselves: the Beatles, Stones, Dylan and the others...
...Individual groups and performers do usually attain prominence through merchandising-the Beatles being the most obvious example...
...But Dylan has reacted with complete indifference, and continues to record R&R...
...And when his next album...
...Louis, was affected more by hillbilly than by Delta blues...
...Of all the current Rock groups, the Beatles undoubtedly have the most intrinsic musical talent, yet are not necessarily the best...
...Contemporary Rock is self-consciously borrowing from an earlier period, yet it is quite aware of its modern features...
...That was the true beginning of Rock...
...Other groups of many kinds have adapted and developed their style to better advantage...
...Dylan began as a "modern" folk singer, that is, one who wrote his own material...
...Berry, born in St...
...If the Beatles are a Rock 'n Roll group casting a retrospective glance at Rhythm and Blues, the Stones are an R&B combo stylistically looking ahead toward Rock...
...R&B was transformed into R&R in 1954 when Cleveland disc jockey Alan Freed played what were then called "race" records (Rhythm and Blues by Negro performers) on a white station, merely changing the epithet to Rock 'n Roll...
...Concurrent with these developments in Rock, folk music was also undergoing a change and some folk groups briefly competed with Rock in popularity...
...That same year, Freed moved to New York and soon Rock 'n Roll (which he christened himself) became a national craze...
...Nor is it a sickness...
...The Animals should really be classed with the Stones and Beatles as an R&B influenced group...
...Rhythm and Blues in its pure form remained exclusively Negro...
...In the course of two years as a professional folk singer, Dylan acquired a rather large and fanatical following-one that wished him to remain exactly the way he was...
...Sonny and Cher properly belong to the pre-Beatles period...
...A phenomenon which has been around for a dozen years, and through its progenitor, for 30, is not simply a fad...
...His experiment was immediately successful, and led to the first R&B song performed by a white group, Bill Haley and the Comets' "Rock Around the Clock...
...The subject matter of R&B songssex, drugs, love, unhappiness-was largely unchanged from the old blues, as was the "lonely," plaintive and unharmonic vocal style...
...Intellectuals such as Dwight MacDonald usually view Rock as an advertising-created phenomenon...
...Those American folk artists who represent a truly serious but uncommercial tradition-"Doc" Watson, "Mississippi" John Hurt, "Lightnin' " Hopkins-are close to the central Rhythm and Blues tradition...
...Bringing it All Back Home, appeared with several Rock cuts, the violent folkniks really began to yearn for the "old Bob...
...Negro performers and combos still appeared, but songs were directed toward the larger white market, which was clearly prepared to accept this kind of music and reacted enthusiastically as Rock went further and further away from Rhythm and Blues...
...And it is not enough to elaborate upon the obvious: that it is a product of its times...
...Almost all the material they have taken from other sources has been R&B...
...The Stones have a special value not only because these songs simply are not played much any longer (most of the original R&B groups having long since died out) but because their new arrangements have enlivened the original versions...
...From 1957, popular music was dominated by a white Rock 'n Roll more closely related to Frank Sinatra than to Sin-Killer Griffin...
...The heavy beat-inappropriate to the new topics and to the new, nonNegro vocal inflections-faded out almost completely...
...Last summer, while performing with his Rock group at the Newport Folk Festival, he was roundly booed by the partisans of "the old Bob...
...Following the Beatles across the Atlantic from England were the Rolling Stones, who began as a straight Rhythm and Blues outfit and to a great extent still are...
...The Beatles' arrival from England in early 1964 eclipsed modern folk on the record charts and heralded a new period in Rock 'n Roll: new harmonies, new instruments, and an increasingly sophisticated approach to the composition of lyrics...
...In all probability, the tradition of R&B will continue, with older groups either dying out completely, or altering their styles as the Beatles and Stones have done...
...Still, it was the Beatles who brought a pulsating rhythm back to Rock, even though their approach was rather non-bluesy...
...Generally, the tempo of a Stones arrangement is faster than that of the original R&B performers, and there is no attempt to imitate Negro vocal inflections...
...In many ways, the Beatles are the logical successors to Chuck Berry, and have in fact recorded two of his songs...
...With the arrival on the scene of a young ex-convict named Chuck Berry (convicted of statutory rape of the girl amiably commemorated in his hit song, "Sweet Little Sixteen"), Rock began to shed more of its blues qualities...
...Success, however, has enervated them-now the Beatles, too, have strayed from their original style to one which, in their newest album, Rubber Soul, is neither R&R, nor R&B, but milkwhite pop...
...Through his influence, Rock became less obsessed with misfortune (though this obsession, transformed into adolescent sentimentality, was never lost entirely) and began exchanging its slow, heavy beat for a much lighter and faster one...
...But as a form of music, Rock has an authentic history and pedigree of its own entirely unconnected with Madison Avenue campaigns (which to one degree or another affect all music today, as the career of Van Cliburn will attest...
...Its salient characteristic is a grinding, unvarying beat, produced by no less than four rhythm instruments...
...The only distinctly different Folk Rock singer is Dylan himself, who founded and inspired the movement...
...As mistaken as this editorial was, it represents the kind of treatment serious critics continue to give the most popular musical form of our time...
...Excluding Bob Dylan (who also performs Rock), the most popular solo folk performers in America are Joan Baez, whose voice has the expressive quality of running tap water (or pace Langsten Hughes, a mountain stream), and Pete Seeger, who is obviously admired more for his stage personality and leftist politics than for his musicality or authenticity (as his wife admitted in Sing Out, mouthpiece of the pretentiously anti-commercial but not fully traditionalist folkniks...
...Unlike jazz, Rhythm and Blues was almost wholly ignored by the white public until Alan Freed's 1954 radio program...
...Developed in the Chicago of the '30s, during one of the great Negro migrations from the South, it is the standard 12-bar blues, with accompaniment by electric lead, rhythm and bass guitars, piano, drums, harmonica (already familiar in the blues) and, sometimes, saxophone and organ...
...The nation's two most popular folk groups, Peter, Paul and Mary and the Kingston Trio, holdovers from the early '60s, are frankly and successfully commercial...
...In The Other Side of Bob Dylan, however, he moved away from social to strictly personal or familial protest songs, for which he was quite violently criticized, especially by Sing Out, which follows a pro-Soviet political line...
...After Berry came Presley, and after Presley came the deluge...
...But in the process of being performed by this white, English, thoroughly contemporary group, the Rhythm and Blues songs have undergone a transformation...
...Indeed, it can be argued that in some of its forms Rock is very close to being the authentic folk music of this country...
...ON MUSIC By R. S. Draper Rolling with Rock Early in 1964, when the Beatles first received wide attention in the United States, the editorialists of the Reporter wrote a semi-humorous piece advising parents not to fear: The Beatles were so bad that their "Mersey beat" would be the terminal cacophony of Rock 'n Roll...
...Closely related to the English sound, a new fad emerged late in 1965: Folk Rock...
...Rock is music, it is not "music...
...To an extent this is true...
...But in its present form, folk music can lay no more claim than Rock can to being "authentic" American-particularly since it is Madison Avenue folk, rather than Mississippi or country folk, which is most saleable in the U.S...
...While serious critics persist in looking upon Rock 'n Roll purely as a product of juvenile delinquency, or as a vulgar expression of the malaise du si??cle, the truth is that R&R is of more than sociological and psychological interest...
...R&B itself had grown out of white country music and Negro Mississippi Delta blues...
...They lack Berry's virtuosity on the guitar, but have compensated by adding new harmonies and chords to the almost amoebic simplicity of his style, and by rebelliously dispensing with haircuts...
...Subject matter was the first element to be altered by white attitudes: Songs were now written about suburban teen love, cars, and affluent pre-adolescent escapism...
...The immediate progenitor of today's rage was Rhythm and Blues...
...While Berry was Negro, R&R was already dominated by white groups...
Vol. 49 • February 1966 • No. 5
